Forget Assets! Keeping Prototypes Simple.
Objective: Explain the benefits of prototyping without using assets.
“They slow us down to speed us up. By taking the time to prototype our ideas, we avoid costly mistakes such as becoming too complex too early and sticking with a weak idea for too long.”
— Tim Brown, CEO & President of IDEO
This is not an article on software engineering prototyping models. If you were looking for such a topic, I apologize for pumping up your level of excitement but I can assure you there is an abundance of articles available on the Web. Rather, it is my take on the importance of keeping the early stages of game design as simple as possible.
We all have these amazing ideas bouncing inside our heads. Yeah…you know it! Where we struggle, it’s in transferring this imaginary realm into a reality we can interact with. We try to dump our entire vision into Unity instead of working on bite-size chunks. This is where prototyping comes into play.
Why should I prototype ideas? As I alluded to earlier, with so many game-ready assets available on the Web, it’s extremely easy to fall into the trap of trying to build your finished product from scratch. Understandably so. The problem is, that in doing this, you are invariably working through the creation process backward. You don’t build an aircraft without first listing the desired features, designing and modeling the fuselage, airfoils, propulsion, fuel, hydraulics, avionics, etc. It’s like giving your engineers a finished shell for a product and telling them to make everything else fit within that shell to turn it into a working model. You just can’t do this.
Throwing a bunch of primitive shapes on a screen can be done quickly with just a few clicks in Unity. They offer a way to focus on engineering the behavior while eliminating the potential distraction of wanting to tweak and improve on the potential visual assets. It saves time!
It also saves money. Not all assets are free. Imagine you bought all these cool assets and add-ons with the intent of implementing them into a project, only to find yourself hitting an insurmountable barrier and needing to ditch the entire project. Bummer…If only you had taken the time to concentrate on the mechanics involved, you would have come to the conclusion that your project needed a whole different set of assets.
Another benefit of delaying the implementation of assets is to simply declutter your workspace, keeping everything clear and clean. Doing so will save you time since it eliminates the pull of distractions and rabbit holes to fix and tweak other elements of the Game scene.
My approach is fairly simple. I sketch out my idea, branching out as required in a way that is similar to using mind-maps, and take the time to break down each of these branches into manageable tasks or challenges using lots of pseudo-code along the way. Let’s say I wish to create a user interface to move and jump. In my mind, it’s more important to first get that primitive cube to follow my keyboard inputs and jump on command. Once that basic structure is working well under the hood, then I can worry about replacing the cube with a 2D sprite (or 3D asset), and progress along systematically through the animation process.
There you have it. Not a very long article by any means, but I think the message is clear. Don’t worry about the assets at the beginning of your project. This is like building a Ferrari without an engine; it looks pretty, but it won’t go anywhere! Focus on the mechanics using simple primitive shapes to prototype your ideas. The assets will be patiently waiting.
Thanks for reading.
